NANAIMO, BC—One month after BC Energy Minister Bill Bennett announced that smart meters are no longer mandatory for citizens who do not want one, a Nanaimo man had a smart meter forcibly installed, and his property vandalized in the process, by an individual who appears to have been a BC Hydro employee.

Jurgen Goering has one more smart meter on his home today than he did yesterday. And not by choice.

I visited Goering at his downtown Nanaimo home this afternoon. He told me that an unidentified man driving a BC Hydro van and wearing civilian clothes entered his backyard yesterday around 2:00 pm, broke through his padlocked plywood barricade guarding his three remaining analogue meters, and exchanged one of them for a wireless smart meter while Goering stood there telling him to leave.

“This really shakes my faith in the political system and in BC Hydro,” Goering told me.

“What [Energy Minister] Bill Bennett did when he announced the opt-out last month was to send a message that the war in the backyards is over. So why did this happen?” Goering asks.

Goering says he confronted the installer on the spot yesterday and told him he was trespassing.

“I also told him I was the homeowner and I was not granting permission,” says Goering.

The installer, who had already ripped out the woodscrews holding the padlock on the plywood barricade, continued installing the smart meter beside a posted sign forbidding it and then left, Goering told me.

Goering’s home has four hydro meters on it – one for each separate residence. And he owns the entire building. One of the four meters had been replaced with a smart meter a year earlier, when a tenant moved out and contacted BC Hydro to close the account. Goering was using plywood and padlocks to protect the other three analogue meters on his home from a similar fate.

RCMP Non-responsive

Goering says he also phoned the police while the unauthorized installation was in progress. But the police told him to phone BC Hydro instead, leaving Goering dumbfounded.

“Someone’s invading the privacy of your home and premises, and you can’t get them off your land?” Goering asks.

Last month, on July 11, BC Energy Minister Bill Bennett announced that the province will now offer citizens alternatives to the once mandatory smart meter program.

“People who want to opt out can,” Bennett stated. “They will not be forced to have a smart meter, but they are going to have to pay the costs… We don’t want to force people to have a smart meter if they really don’t want one,” Bennett told the public. “It’s not our intention to offend people or bully people.”

Either someone forgot to inform BC Hydro of the Minister’s new policy, or else the government’s promise of an opt-out option for customers was never genuine to begin with.

“It’s like living in George Orwell’s 1984,” says Goering. “It’s double-speak and double-think. They say one thing and do the opposite.”

Last month two BC organizations, Citizens for Safe Technology and Coalition to Stop Smart Meters, filed a class action lawsuit against BC Hydro to force the corporation to adopt a genuine opt-out option in which customers will be allowed to keep or revert to their analogue meters, and pay no additional costs for their choice.

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re·fu·gi·um—An area that has escaped changes occurring elsewhere, thereby providing suitable habitat in which organisms can survive through a period of unfavorable conditions. [from Latin refugium, from refugere to flee away, from re- + fugere to escape]

Kim Goldberg is an award-winning writer in Nanaimo, British Columbia. She is the author of six books and more than 2,000 articles. Kim holds a degree in Biology from University of Oregon and is an avid birdwatcher and nature lover. Read more about Kim here. Email: goldberg@ncf.ca